Стихотворения

        you meet him wherever you go
across the bright campus, past ivy-clad walls.
The wind which is driving him mad (this recalls
        a rather good line in Hugo),
keeps making blue holes in the waterproof gloss
of college-bred poplars that rustle and toss
        their slippery shadows at pied
young beauties, all legs, as they bicycle through
his shoulder, his armpit, his heart, and the two
        big books that are hurting his side.

Verlaine had been also a teacher. Somewhere
in England. And what about great Baudelaire,
        alone in his Belgian hell?
This ivy resembles the eyes of the deaf.
Come, leaf, name a country beginning with «f»;
        for instance, «forget» or «farewell».
Thus dimly he muses and dreamily heeds
his eavesdropping self as his body recedes,
        dissolving in sun-shattered shade.
L'Envoi: Those poor chairs in the Bois, one of which
legs up, stuck half-drowned in the slime of a ditch
        while others were grouped in a glade.

<13 сентября> 1942

434. A POEM{*}

When he was small, when he would fall,
on sand or carpet he would lie
quite flat and still until he knew
what he would do: get up or cry.

After the battle, flat and still
upon a hillside now he lies —
but there is nothing to decide,
for he can neither cry nor rise.

11 ноября 1942; Сент Пол, Миннесота

435. DREAM{*}

«Now it is coming, and the sooner
the better», said my swooning soul —
and in the sudden blinding lunar
landscape, out of a howling hole

a one-legged child that howled with laughter
hopped and went hopping hopping after
a bloody and bewildered bone,
a limb that walked away alone.

Perhaps the window shade had billowed
and slapped the darkness on the face;
but when I had picked up and pillowed
the book of sleep and found the place,

I saw him haltingly returning
out of the dust, back to the burning
hole of his three-walled home — that boy
hugging a new, a nameless toy.

<16 августа 1944>; Кембридж, Масс.

436. DANDELIONS{*}

Moons on the lawn replace the suns
that mowers happily had missed.
Where age would stoop, a babe will squat
and rise with star-fluff in its first.

30 мая 1950; Итака, Нью-Йорк

437. LUNAR LINES{*}

Spell «night». Spell «pebbles»: Pebbles in the Night.
Peep, crated chicks on lonely station! This
Is now the ABC of the abyss,